ls of Faith and Duty 



RHOOD 




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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



jflamtals; of JFattl) ann Dutp 

EDITED BY REV. J. S. CANTWELL, D.D. 



A SERIES of short books in exposition of prominent teachings 
of the Universalist Church, and the moral and religious 
obligations of believers. They are prepared by writers selected for 
their ability to present in brief compass an instructive and helpful 
Manual on the subject undertaken. The volumes will be affirmative 
and constructive in statement, avoiding controversy, while specifically 
unfolding doctrines. The series is designed to meet the wants of 
inquirers interested in particular points of the Universalist Faith and 
to help those who are already believers. 

Manuals of Faith and Duty will be issued at intervals of 
three or four months ; uniform in size, style, and price. 

No. I. 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

By Rev. J. Coleman Adams, Chicago. 

No. II. 
JESUS THE CHRIST. 

By Rev. Stephen Crane, D.D., Norwalk, O. 

No. III. 

REVELATION. 

By Rev. I. M. At wood, D. D., President of the Theological 
School, Canton, N. Y. 

Other volumes and writers will be announced hereafter. Among 
the subjects already selected for treatment are : " Retribution," 
" The Indwelling Christ," "The Birth from Above," "Heaven and 
Hell," etc. 



published by the 

UNIVERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE, 

BOSTON, MASS. 
Western Branch : 69 Dearborn Street, Chicago. 



Jttanuate of jfattij anU ©utg. 

No. I. 



THE 



FATHERHOOD OF GOD 



BY 

REV. JOHN COLEMAN ADAMS. 



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^ MAY 19 1888- 



BOSTON: <3^*&<f 




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UNIVEKSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE. 
1888. 



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Copyright, 1888, 
By the Universalist Publishing House. 




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BEmbersttg Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge 



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CONTENTS. 

♦ 

Section Page 

I. Relation of the Doctrine to Revelation 6 

II. The Old Testament Teaching .... 7 

III. The Doctrine of Our Lord 11 

IV. The Apostolic Doctrine 18 

V. The Doctrine of Adoption 25 

VI. The Teaching of the Fathers .... 32 

VII. Divine Fatherhood and Divine Love . . 38 

VIII. Fatherhood and Human Depravity ... 51 

IX. Fatherhood and the Problem of Evil .57 

X. Fatherhood and Retribution ..... 64 

XI. The Divine Fatherhood and Human 

Sorrow 74 

XII. Divine Fatherhood and Human Destiny . 83 
XIII. The Divine Fatherhood and Human 

Conduct 91 



2Efje fast name bg tofjtcfj foe can tfjinft 
of ®ofc t'g Jatfjer, It is a lobtng, sirrect, 
fjeart-toucjjtng name ; for tfje name of Jatfjer 
fe, in ttg nature, full of inborn gtoeetnesa 
anU comfort. 

Martin Luther. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 



" HT^HE fatherly relation and purpose of God 
J- toward men," said Thomas Erskine, " is 
the fundamental revelation of Christianity." In 
that sentence, the spiritually-minded Scot an- 
nounced the growing faith of his own day and 
of ours. This great fact of the Divine economy 
is the corner-stone of the Christian system. It 
was the end and aim of the unfolding revelation 
which God made to the nation to whom He com- 
mitted the truth concerning His nature and His 
disposition. It is a truth which was perceived 
with a growing clearness as the work of revela- 
tion proceeded : and the inspiring idea in the 
mind of Him in whom that work culminated, is 
the fatherhood of God and man's sonship to Him. 
All the truths which Jesus Christ gave to man 
have their root in this fundamental truth ; all 
the Saviour's teaching rests at last upon this 



6 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

conception of God. And every fact of Christ's 
dealings with men is tinged with a reflection 
caught from the brightness of this radiant verity 
of the spiritual universe. 

I. — Relation of the Doctrine to Revelation. 

In saying that the truth of the Divine father- 
hood was gradually made known to men, we but 
follow the teaching which the most distinguished 
and trustworthy defenders of the faith assert. 
The course of revelation was progressive. There 
is a steady advance in the announcement of 
Divine truth, from the earliest statements of the 
law, down to the universal principles made known 
by Jesus Christ. As Dr. George P. Fisher says : 
" It is plain that the religious consciousness, or 
the general type of religious ideas and feelings, 
rises higher and higher as we pass from one 
epoch to another of Hebrew history. Only by 
degrees did that which was latent in the relation 
assumed by God toward men, come to the light. 
. . . That Christianity is a higher stage in the 
process of revelation, the New Testament leaves 
us no room for doubt." 2 Or as Canon Row says : 

1 Beginnings of Christianit}', pp. 7, 9. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 7 

" Christianity ... is a plant which has grown 
in a succession of gradual stages until its culmi- 
nation in Jesus Christ." 1 Hence we shall not 
look for the same clear grasp of the fact in the 
minds of the Old Testament writers that we shall 
find in the souls of those on whom inspiration had 
fallen in later days. Nevertheless, the Old Tes- 
tament does certainly contain assertions of the 
nature of God's relation to man and man's rela- 
tion to God, which serve as the lower courses in 
the rising structure of revealed truth, uncontra- 
dicted by later disclosures. 

II. — The Old Testament Teaching. 

This fact gives great significance to the pas- 
sages in the Old Testament which touch upon 
this relation of the Creator to humanity. The 
record of the creation is couched in the phrase 
which colors all Christian thought. " Let us 
make man in our image, after our own like- 
ness. ... So God created man in His own 
image." 2 In what this likeness or image con- 
sists, we may discuss farther on ; but it is 
fco be noted at this point that the illumination 

1 Bampton Lectures, 1877, p. 3. 2 Genesis i. 26, 27. 



8 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

which was sufficient to reveal this relation of 
God to man was not enough to stamp it with 
the name of fatherhood. The fact on which 
that relationship rests was discerned, but not 
the real nature of the bond between the Creator 
and the creature. That was to await the coming 
of a clearer vision. 

But whatever may have been the nature of 
this image and likeness of God, it is clear that 
it was not lost in the sin of our progenitor, 
inasmuch as in a later age, long after the pri- 
meval sin, long after the curse was pronounced 
against it, it was made the ground of the Divine 
denouncement of murder. " Whoso sheddeth 
man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed ; 
for in the image of God made He man." l It 
is impossible to evade the force of this pas- 
sage. It can have no meaning whatever except 
upon the assumption that the image of God still 
persists in the human soul, making a human life 
a sacred thing, retaining, even though corrupt 
and fallen, the essential nature in which the 
race was formed. That single passage is fatal 
to all that false view of human nature which 
has tinctured the anthropology of the Christian 

1 Genesis ix. 6. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 9 

Church for fourteen hundred years. It is an 
impregnable text, standing between the truth 
of man's perpetual kinship to God by virtue of 
the Divine image in which he subsists, and the 
assaults of those who would declare him a 
spiritual orphan. 

The same must be said of another word out of 
the mouth of the great law-giver of Israel. It is 
one of those rare and occasional utterances of 
the earlier men of God, which go to show that 
the idea of the universal fatherhood was strug- 
gling through the darkness of their time, — a 
foregleam of the fuller revelation yet to come. 
In the song of Moses he uses these remarkable 
words, " Do ye thus requite the Lord, foolish 
people and unwise ? is not He thy father that 
hath bought thee ? hath He not made thee and 
established thee ? " 1 This is not an address to 
saints, nor to those who by their devotion had 
secured the right to any special claim of son- 
ship ; for in the very verse preceding Moses 
has called those at whom this inquiry is aimed, 
" a perverse and crooked generation." 

And in the same tone does Isaiah, speaking in 
Jehovah's name, say, " Hear, heavens, and give 

1 Deuteronomy xxxii. 6. 



10 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

ear, earth : for the Lord hath spoken. I have 
nourished and brought up children, and they 
have rebelled against me." 1 If that relation- 
ship was still perpetuated after years of re- 
bellion, sinfulness, and spiritual alienation from 
God, and its recognition authorized, it would 
not seem to have been utterly sundered by the 
fall. Still further evidence of the growing sense 
of God's fatherhood appears in the words of the 
prophet Malachi, where he speaks for Jehovah 
to Israel, and says, " A son honoureth his father, 
and a servant his master : if then I be a father, 
where is mine honour? and if I be a master, 
where is my fear ? saith the Lord of hosts unto 
you, priests, that despise my name." 2 And 
there is an evidence of the connection in the 
minds of these later prophets of the fact of 
creation with the truth of God's universal father- 
hood in that other passage from the book of 
Malachi: "Have we not all one Father? hath 
not one God created us ?" 3 That is not said of 
regenerate men, but of those 4 who have not kept 
God's ways. And it shows beyond question that 
in the mind of this prophet the fatherhood of 

i Isaiah i. 2. 2 Malachi i. 6. 

3 Ibid. ii. 10. 4 Ibid. 9. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 11 

God was coextensive with His creatorship over 
souls. 

III. — The Doctrine of Our Lord. 

But the thought of fatherhood is still germi- 
nal, and its development and application in all 
its tender and beautiful phases was reserved for 
a greater than this prophet. 

Dr. Geikie, in his Life of Christ, strikingly 
reiterates the words quoted from Thomas Ers- 
kine in the beginning of this book, when he says 
that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus makes a 
new era for man. " He rises above his age and 
announces a common Father of all mankind, 
and one spiritual ideal in resemblance to Him." l 
And Dr. Phillips Brooks, in the Bohlen Lec- 
tures for 1879, on the " Influence of Jesus," pro- 
nounces Christianity a personal force, behind 
which there lies one great inspiring idea, name- 
ly, u The fatherhood of God and the childhood of 
every man to Him. ... To reassert the father- 
hood and childhood as an unlost truth, and to 
re-establish its power as the central fact of life ; 
to tell men that they were, and make them act- 
ually be the sons of God, — that was the purpose 

1 Life of Christ, ch. 37. 



12 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

of the coming of Jesus and the shaping power of 
His life." 1 The Sermon on the Mount is filled 
with the idea of the fatherhood of God. It was 
addressed to a " multitude." It was the delivery 
of a law to humanity. It was the announcement 
of a new standard of conduct for all men. And 
to assert that the frequent references to God's 
fatherhood in that discourse mean no more than 
His fatherhood to the elect and regenerate is to 
say that the whole sermon is no more than an 
exhortation to those who have entered the king- 
dom of God, and is not to be applied to mankind 
at large ; because the references to the father- 
hood are so interwoven with the exhortations, 
that to limit the one is to restrict the other. 
And that construction the sermon will not bear. 
It was a continuous exhortation to men as 
children of God that they be worthy of their 
Father. Through all its shining sentences there 
runs this golden thread. The fact of God's 
fatherhood, the relationship between man and 
his Maker is urged and repeated and dwelt upon 
as the ground of obedience, of sacrifice, of self- 
denial, or of devotion. The sonship of man is 
always the primary fact. The reason for doing 

1 Influence of Jesus, pp. 12, 14. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 13 

or not doing, for thought or for action, is always 
this, namely, that the man may be worthy of his 
origin, — a true son, and not a disloyal one, ful- 
filling his own nature and destiny. " Be ye 
therefore perfect," he says," even as your Father 
is perfect." " Love your enemies," in order, it 
appears, " that ye may be the children of your 
Father which is in heaven." " Let your light 
so shine before men that they may glorify your 
Father." Is it needful to multiply quotations ? 
The whole Sermon might be cited as teeming 
with the most explicit repetitions in various keys 
and many modulations of this recurrent phrase 
of Divine truth, which is all summed up in the 
prayer He put into the mouth of humanity, 
whose opening words are " Our Father." 

That prayer has been by universal consent 
considered the prayer for all classes and condi- 
tions of men. It is the voice of human nature 
crying to its God. In the words of Dr. Plumptre, 
u It is true of all men. . . . Our right to use 
that name is no peculiar privilege of ours, but is 
shared by every member of the great family of 
God." * The venerable Dr. Mark Hopkins, com- 
menting upon these words, remarks : " This term 

1 Handy Commentary, vol. i. p. 78. 



14 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

I suppose He intended to authorize all men to 
use, and that in the use of it, with the full un- 
derstanding of its import, there is implied that 
image of God in which man was created." 1 To 
try to limit the scope of that address, compre- 
hending as it does the most sacred truth ever 
unfolded to the mind of man, is a perversion of 
the Scripture which is excusable only to the 
blindest prejudice. 

It is indeed sometimes argued that one who 
from the heart can use this prayer is not an 
" alien," but a disciple ; is penitent, is a seeker 
after God, and so, by anticipation, a child of 
God. But for hundreds of years the Augusti- 
nian theology has taught that no man is entitled 
to call God father who is not regenerate ; for 
only regeneration can create the filial bond. 
But simply to be penitent is not to be restored. 
The inquirer is not a convert; discipleship is 
not regeneration. To meet the truth of God 
with such perverse trifling with terms of the 
deeper meaning is lamentable if done in igno- 
rance ; is culpable if done through premedita- 
tion to maintain a cause. For in those words 
the Saviour of mankind thrust in upon our 

1 Scriptural Idea of Man, p. 26. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 15 

spiritual consciousness the solemn truth that 
we are by our very natures the children of God, 
whose image we sully when we sin, whose grace 
we abuse, whose love we grieve, when we give 
our souls to evil. 

Nor is this the only discourse of our Saviour's 
in which He lays upon the heart of man this 
sacred truth. The parable of the Prodigal Son 
has been called the gospel within the gospel, so 
thoroughly does it compress within itself the 
significance of the message of our Saviour. 
And nothing can be made of its touching story 
except the fatherly attitude of God to man, and 
the filial nature and relationship which not even 
transgression can rupture. The father loves that 
son even in his exile. The son is still a son, 
even in his degradation. What better type could 
we ask of man's relations to his Father, which 
not even sin can break nor the corruptions of 
an evil life annul ? What finer phrase was ever 
devised to express the essential nature of repent- 
ance than these words : " And when he came to 
himself?" What clearer inculcation could we 
ask of the truth that as man is a son of God by 
no act of his own, so no act of his can ever cancel 
the relationship; but that even in his deepest 



16 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

degradation lie may think of the Heavenly Father 
as his father ? What stronger appeal could we 
make to sinful men to be worthy of their son- 
ship, and to earn and accept the rejected place 
to which they are entitled ? 

Those are significant words, too, which Jesus 
uses in addressing the woman of Samaria, who, 
being only an alien as yet and a stranger even 
to the circle of Jewish ideas, as well as a soiled 
and unregulated nature, is yet told of " The 
Father " in that broad and inclusive tone which 
is evidently meant to make her feel that God is 
her father, because He is the Father of all flesh. 
" Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the 
hour cometh when ye shall neither in this moun- 
tain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. 
. . . The hour cometh and now is when the true 
worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit 
and in truth : for the Father seeketh such to 
worship Him." Here is a term used broadly, 
as if in the Saviour's mind it represented an 
established and universal relationship. To limit 
its meaning to a relation to the saved, would be 
to make the term one of the most inappropriate 
that could be used to this unconverted heathen. 
The clear intent of our Lord was to make her 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 17 

feel what she had in all likelihood never dreamed 
before, that the God to whom the varying wor- 
ship of Samaritan and Jew was rendered was 
the common Father of both peoples, — " The 
Father" of all men. 

What we learn from these explicit utterances 
of the Saviour, we infer from all His teaching 
and His bearing toward men. He treats them 
all as children of the one Father, lost, indeed, 
exiled from home, wanderers in a strange and 
alien life, degrading the powers which belong 
to the Lord into the service of the basest ends, 
but even as children whom the Father loves 
because He is their Father, whom He seeks 
because He loves, whom He will find because 
He seeks. There are no finer examples of the 
spirit which pervades God's moral economy and 
is the mbtive of His dealings with His evil off- 
spring than the parables of the Lost Sheep and 
of the Lost Piece of Silver. And the thought 
which fills both of them is of an ownership, a 
right and title in the thing lost, which that loss 
does not affect, and which sends the owner search- 
ing till he finds what he seeks ; and grouped as 
they are with the parable of the Prodigal Son, 
their meaning is clear as day, — the truth that 

2 



18 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

God seeks men to save them because He is 
theirs and they are His ; He their Father, they 
His children ; dear to Him in spite of their evil, 
precious in His sight in spite of their ruin ; His 
by right, though temporarily given over to the 
Devil ; sons still, though exiles ; true sheep of 
the fold, though straying and forlorn ; stamped 
with the image of heaven, though trampled 
under foot in the rubbish and refuse of life. 

IV. — The Apostolic Doctrine. 

The apostles of Jesus Christ were not slow to 
grasp their Master's meaning, and to thrust it to 
the front in dealing with the world they now 
went forth to convert. In various ways, accord- 
ing to the conditions of those to whom they 
spoke, they enforced the truth that Jesus Christ 
had revealed to man, — the fact of God's father- 
hood, His love, and His compassion for man. 
And whenever this thought is pressed upon 
human attention it is always urged home with 
the special appeal that men shall deport them- 
selves as sons, and not as strangers to their 
God. The truth was impressed upon Peter's 
mind in the vision of the sheet let down from 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 19 

heaven, in which he was taught that a Gentile in 
God's sight was of equal value with a Jew, — a 
soul to be saved, a child to be reclaimed. Paul 
preached it to the Athenians, when he reminded 
them that " we are the offspring of God." The 
offspring resembles the parent. And Paul's ar- 
gument with the Greeks turns upon the fact 
that since the offspring is the image of the 
parent, the son is the likeness of the father, we 
being in the likeness of God ; because His chil- 
dren ought not to think of Him as like lifeless, 
unintelligent " gold, silver, or stone." Paul 
uses the same thought again to enforce a practi- 
cal measure upon the Christian church when he 
insists upon the men's praying with their heads 
uncovered, because man is in the image of God, — 
an argument which would be absolutely without 
point unless Paul meant to say that the image 
still remained in the men of Corinth. 

In the epistles especially do we read the mind 
of Paul upon this point in unmistakable clear- 
ness. To him there is but one thought of God, 
and that is as a Father, humanity as one family, 
redemption a universal work, salvation the com- 
mon destiny of the race. And whether he is 
bidding the Gentile rejoice in his membership in 



20 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

the spiritual family or urging the Jew to make 
good his descent from Abraham by an inward 
sonship to God, or calling on his Christian 
charges to be glad in their new knowledge of 
this glorious relationship which at once ennobles 
them and magnifies God's name, Paul is always 
conscious of the new truth which has been re- 
vealed in Christ and is meant for every creature : 
" To us there is but one God, the Father." 
That name to him is the only sufficient name by 
which to designate God ; and that is the name 
revealed through Jesus Christ. And he is em- 
phatic in insisting 1 that the Christian should 
think of this trait as the peculiar characteristic 
of God, as He was revealed in Jesus. 

In the epistle to the Ephesians 2 Paul makes 
use of the same phrase, which shows that it is 
to him a familiar thought, when in stating 
the characteristics of Christian faith he states as 
one of its articles : " One God and Father of 
all, who is above all, and through all, and in 
you all." Undoubtedly this is an utterance to 
Christians, and therefore to those who had come 
to a knowledge and a recognition of their son- 
ship and were trying to make their lives con- 

1 1 Corinthians viii. 6. 2 Ephesians iv. 6. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 21 

form to their lineage. But just as undoubtedly 
it is the statement of a truth which, though 
made known to and understood only by the 
Christian consciousness of that day, is a uni- 
versal fact, true of and for all men. Spoken to 
those who have entered into the enjoyment of 
their sonship with all its hallowed privileges, it 
is yet a truth which applies to those who are yet 
ignorant of its inclusiveness, and careless of its 
import. Dr. Ellicott, Bishop of Gloucester and 
Bristol, has a most excellent and pertinent 
thought upon this passage : " God is said to be 
the ' Father of all.' We cannot limit this im- 
mense fatherhood ; although undoubtedly the 
context shows that the immediate reference is 
to those who are His children by adoption in 
Jesus Christ. The Church is essentially catholic, 
inheriting by special gift what is the birthright 
of all humanity ; incapable of perfection till all 
be drawn into that closer sonship, yet having 
neither the right nor the desire to deny that 
outside His pale at any moment the wider father- 
hood of God extends." * 

But we may not neglect another view of our 
theme, which engaged the attention of the sacred 
writers. 

1 Handy Commentary. 



22 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

A large part of what they have to say concerns 
itself with those who disobey the Divine law, and 
separate themselves from the Father's love and 
presence. For these there are strong and search- 
ing words, stern, uncompromising, bitter. They 
are called " aliens " and " strangers " and " for- 
eigners." They are pronounced " enemies." They 
are dismissed as " bastards and not sons." They 
are described as " children of the Devil," doing 
the works of their father, the Devil. And the 
question is asked, How are we to reconcile these 
terrible phrases with the teaching that all men 
are God's children ? Are these to be called the 
children of God, with an inalienable title to the 
kingdom of heaven ? Is Judas as truly a child 
of God as John ? Has Nero as inalienable a 
claim on God's love as Paul ? Is the fatherhood 
of God extended to these degraded, depraved, 
rebellious, and utterly vicious creatures as fall 
under the denunciations of all righteous and con- 
scientious men ? What shall be said to these 
searching questions ? 

In the first place, it is to be remarked that 
such phrases as these refer not to the native and 
essential nature of the soul, and its relation back 
to its source, but to an acquired character, the 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 23 

outcome of evil choice and vicious living. There 
is no dispute over the fact of sin, nor over the 
ruinous consequences of sin, nor over the es- 
trangement that sin creates between man and 
God, nor about the injury done to the image of 
God imprinted on man's nature. These are facts 
of human experience. And there are no words 
too vigorous and scathing to describe the moral 
state of the reprobate and sinful soul. Sin does 
make man an alien, a stranger, and a foreigner 
toward God. It cuts him off from the enjoyment 
of his birthright. It interrupts his blessings, and 
delays his inheritance of the joys of the kingdom 
of heaven. But it does not, for it cannot, alter 
man's innate and constitutional relation to God. 
The creation of man in the image of God 
means, if it means anything, that man is consti- 
tutionally in the likeness of his Maker. He has 
in him all the capacities of a true son of God, 
— capacities which sin may pervert, corrupt, de- 
prave, deaden, but not destroy, not annihilate. 
And those capacities, even while they are unful- 
filled, are the inalienable claim of the soul to the 
position of sonship. Is not your babe your child ? 
Must he grow to maturity, and learn to obey and 
love you, before he is your son ; or do his very 



24 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

capacities, his constitution, his germinal charac- 
teristics, entitle him to your love, your care, your 
oversight as a father ? Does a man disown his 
offspring and refuse to acknowledge them as 
children until they have come to reflect the pa- 
rental virtues ? Are they deprived of the privi- 
lege of calling him their father until they are 
old enough and disciplined enough to give a 
free obedience ? Capacity for sonship is sonship, 
when it inheres in the very constitution of the 
offspring. And whatever inheres in that con- 
stitution cannot be lost out of it, except by the 
annihilation of life itself. 

Moreover, if we were to accept the assertion 
that God is not the Father of those who have 
not yet come to love Him, we involve ourselves 
in a most serious difficulty. God creates every 
new soul that is born into this life. It is a fresh 
creation from the Divine Hand, and it brings with 
it a new breath from God's creative spirit. The 
old answer to the question, " Who made you ? " 
is still the first upon our lips. " It is He that 
hath made us, and not we ourselves." But if 
God makes every one of us, He either makes us 
in His image or not in His image. If He makes 
us in His image, then He makes us by very birth 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 25 

and constitution His children. If He does not 
make us in His image, but creates us in total 
corruption and evil, turning naturally and in- 
evitably to sin, how can He hold us guilty for 
conforming to the very constitution He has given 
us ? You cannot blame a dog for biting. You 
cannot blame a child of the Devil, born so, con- 
stituted so, essentially and radically and totally 
inclined to the works of the Devil, for turning to 
devilish things. 

But evidently when Jesus says to the Jews 
whom He would rebuke, " Ye are of your father 
the Devil," He uses the phrase only in that figura- 
tive way in which they call themselves " children 
of Abraham." They were exhibiting a malig- 
nant and devilish spirit, and in so far were prop- 
erly styled the children of the Devil. They had 
not recognized their true kinship to God by a 
godly behavior ; and so they were denying their 
true relation and assuming a kinship of disposi- 
tion and character to Satan himself. 

V. — The Doctrine of Adoption. 

But there is still more to be said, before we 
have fairly stated the New Testament doctrine 



26 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

of the fatherhood. There is no doubt a special 
sense in which this relation applies to the obedi- 
ent child, which is not and cannot be true of 
the disobedient. It is a common habit of men 
to say of one who repeats in himself the char- 
acter and peculiar personal traits of his father, 
" You are your father's own child." The mean- 
ing is clear enough. Moral likeness is a real- 
ization of what the natural relationship stands 
for; and so the moral likeness of man to his 
Father carries into effect all the blessed conse- 
quences of his sonship, which are conditioned 
upon his obedience and love for their full be- 
stowment. God is the Father of all souls. But 
He is especially the Father of those who by the 
birth from above have come into the practice 
and spirit of the divine life. A man is always 
God's child in the sense that he is made in 
God's image, is created by God's love, is sus- 
tained by His care, is the object of His affection- 
ate providence in training and education. But 
lie is never a true son, a good son, never any- 
thing but a prodigal, a wayward, unfaithful, 
false, and degenerate son, until he has sought to 
return his Father's love, and render to Him a 
filial obedience. And so while God is the Father 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 27 

of all souls, He stands in a peculiarly near and 
tender relationship to those who acknowledge 
their sonship and perform their filial duties. 
He holds this attitude too by virtue of the same 
fact which makes Him, as Paul calls Him, 
" The Saviour of all men, specially of those 
that believe." 1 

Until Christ opened the minds of men to the 
transcendent fact, the fatherhood of God was an 
unknown truth. They lived in ignorance of it, 
or with the most shadowy knowledge of it. But 
when He who bore in Himself at once the divine 
and the human nature unfolded to man His real 
standing in God's sight and the real tie by 
which God's heart was bound to Him, He brought 
a new motive to bear upon human life, and re- 
vealed a new power in connection with it. For 
by the knowledge He gave them, Jesus Christ 
made men understand whose children they were ; 
and by the spirit He imparted to them He 
helped them to become in reality what they nom- 
inally already were, that is, the sons of God. 
The child is the man in the intent of his Creator ; 
but he has yet to become a man in stature and 
in faculties. In a sense, and in a very true and 

i 1 Timothy iv. 10. 



28 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

literal sense, too, he has yet to become what he 
already is. And so when we come to the develop- 
ment of the spiritual life, a man may be a son of 
God, and yet reject his own right and disown his 
own sonship. And it is only where he has accepted 
his rights and acted in harmony with his own na- 
ture that he becomes in the fullest sense a son. 
That is the meaning of John when he writes : 
" He came unto His own, and His own received 
Him not. But to as many as received Him, to 
them gave He power to become the sons of God." 
Christ came to His own countrymen, kinsmen, 
brethren in the commonwealth of Israel. They 
received Him not. But others did, here and there 
one, a growing number, Jew and Gentile indis- 
criminately, " and to as many as received Him, 
to them gave He power to become the sons of 
God," in the full sense of a consciousness of rela- 
tion and a new life based upon it. This is the 
new birth, the birth from above, namely, the sense 
of sonship received into the soul, and the desire 
to live according to its requirements. It is the 
discovery of God's relation to us, and the desire 
to realize that relationship on our own part. It 
is the birth within us of the dispositions which 
flow naturally from a knowledge of our sonship 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 29 

and a sense of its duties, its privileges, its joys. 
And it is this experience which raises us from 
a merely nominal and latent sonship, a sonship 
inherent but undeveloped, existing but unreal- 
ized, into a sonship which is actual, recognized, 
and appropriated by the soul. 

It follows that no man can become a son of 
God in this secondary and special sense until 
he has been renewed in affections and in will. 
As long as he persists in evil he is cast out from 
the presence of the Father ; he takes the place 
of an alien and a stranger. And he never can 
enter into the possession of his birthright until 
by a change of heart, a disposition born from 
above, he seeks the things which God loves and 
turns from those which God abhors. 

Now this change involves a change in the 
soul's relations to God, and of God to the soul ; 
but it establishes no new relationship. God was 
man's Father before, as He is now ; only He was 
the Father of a rebellious and defiant child, who 
had given himself over to the doing of all unfilial 
things. And He is a Father still, and no more 
than that, to the obedient and loving child who 
does His will and loves His law. There is a 
change of relations, but no change in relationship. 



30 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

The language of the parable of the Prodigal Son 
is decisive upon this point. The Saviour makes 
the father in that touching story refer to the 
wayward one, even in his sins, as still his child. 
" For this my son was dead, and is alive again ; 
he was lost, and is found." He was a lost son, 
he was a dead son, but always he was a son ; 
and his return, his restoration, only change his 
relations to his father and his father's relations 
to him, without in the least affecting the rela- 
tionship which was in its very nature unchange- 
able. Even so the sinful soul does not by its 
sins destroy its relationship to God nor God's re- 
lationship to it. It only brings about a change 
of relations within that unchangeable relation- 
ship. This derangement of right relations be- 
tween God and His sinning child must continue 
as long as the sin, and no longer. But in 
the reconciliation of man to his father which 
comes with repentance and regeneration, he en- 
ters into a higher and better relation with God, 
which has received, in the apostolic writings, 
the name of " adoption." 

Now in this term, for whose use we are in- 
debted to the apostles, we touch a new phase of 
man's life with God. The apostle John, besides 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 31 

the words already quoted, addresses his breth- 
ren in Christ in these words : " Behold what 
manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon 
us, that we should be called the sons of God." 
Paul declares that they who " are led by the 
spirit of God, they are the sons of God ; " x that 
they have received "the spirit of adoption" which 
gives them the right to say, " Abba, Father ; " 2 
that if they are children, " then [are they] 
heirs ; " 3 that if they become pure God " will be 
a father" unto them; 4 and he assures the saints 
at Ephesus that " God hath predestinated us to 
the adoption of children." 5 

In these and like passages we find the teach- 
ing that there is a phase of sonship, an exercise 
of the Divine fatherhood, which belongs espe- 
cially to the obedient and the loyal, — those who 
have given themselves to God ; those who have 
returned from their wanderings in transgression 
and sin. This reinstatement of the sinner in 
the favor of his Father, this restoration of the 
blessings from which sin always cuts him off, is 
called " adoption." It involves more than a mere 
restoration to innocence. Salvation is a larger 

1 Romans viii. 14. 2 Ibid. 15. 3 Ibid. 17. 

4 2 Corinthians vi. 17, 18. 5 Ephesians i. 5, 6. 



32 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

word than mere restoration of an old status. It 
includes the removal of the corruptions and de- 
pravities of sin. and adds to it the induction of the 
soul into a higher spiritual standing, won in the 
long, hard struggle with sin, — the bestowment 
of a new disposition, not in the likeness of Adam, 
but of the Christ. We may not dwell on this 
thought. We leave it with a citation from Dr. 
T. J. Crawford's admirable treatise of " The 
Fatherhood of God." He says : " In the car- 
rying out of this process of restitution, there 
are high and potent agencies employed, with 
which we can scarcely suppose humanity to be 
brought into contact without having all its 
original elements not only restored but glo- 
riously elevated and transfigured, insomuch that 
far more than ivas lost in Adam shall be gained 
in JChrist." l 

VI. — The Teaching of the Fathers. 

It would utterly transcend the limits of a 
single thesis to develop and illustrate this doc- 
trine of the Scriptures more fully. Enough has 
been done in tracing the development of the 

1 The Fatherhood of God, p. 141. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 33 

thought from its early presentation to Israel 
down to its joyful acceptance by the apostles 
of our Lord, to show that it is unquestionably 
the great and transcendent fact of revelation, 
the radical idea of the gospel, the fruitful stem 
from which successively spring forth the branch- 
ing doctrines of the Christian faith. We must 
pass on to review in the briefest way the devel- 
opment of the doctrine in the minds of the later 
learners at the feet of the Christ, whose thought 
has helped to develop the truths of Christianity 
into their more formal statements. In the obscure 
period of the apostolic fathers, we have but scant 
means of tracing the progress of this doctrine. 
But we know that Saint Clement of Rome ex- 
horted his disciples to look steadfastly " unto the 
Father and Maker of the whole world." The 
" Epistle to Diognetus " foreshadows the spirit of 
the age so soon to follow. The writer lays espe- 
cial stress upon the fact that man may imitate 
God, because God has made him in His own im- 
age. " For God has loved mankind," he says, 
" on whose account He made the world, to whom 
He rendered subject all the things that are in 
it, to whom He gave reason and understanding, 
to whom alone He imparted the privilege of 



34 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

looking upward to Himself, whom He formed 
after His own image, to whom He has sent 
His only begotten Son." x 

Clement, the eminent head of the catechetical 
school at Alexandria, held, in the words of 
Professor Allen, that in the redemption there is 
" no readjustment or restoration of a broken 
relationship between God and humanity, but 
rather the revelation of a relationship which had 
always existed, indestructible in its nature, ob- 
scured but not obliterated by human ignorance 
and sin." 2 

Dr. Biggs, in the Bampton Lectures for 1886, 
also says of Clement : " He looks upon redemp- 
tion, not as the restitution of that which was 
lost at the fall, but as the crown and consum- 
mation of the destiny of man, leading to a 
righteousness such as Adam never knew, and to 
heights of glory and power as yet unsealed and 
undreamed. ' The Word of God became Man, 
in order that thou also mayest learn from Man 
how man becomes God.' " 

Origen made no distinction between the nat- 
ural state of Adam and that in whicli all mankind 

1 Epistle to Diognetus, ch. x. 

2 Continuity of Christian Thought, p. 57. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 35 

have since been born. Athanasius taught that in 
order to know God He must be looked for in the 
soul. The soul sees the image of God in itself, 
and in itself conceives the Father. 1 And he 
who formulated the faith the Church has always 
held in the incarnation, declared of God that 
His essential nature was love, and that the inner- 
most being of Deity was to be known in its last 
analysis as the Father. We cannot better state 
the theology which prevailed until the unhappy 
day when the genius of Augustine in the inter- 
ests and the name of Christianity perverted its 
creed and poisoned its spirit, than by citing the 
words in which Professor Allen describes it in 
the Bohlen Lectures for 1883: " It followed 
as a necessary sequence from the first principle 
of Greek theology, — the doctrine of the Di- 
vine immanence, — that man should be viewed 
as having a constitutional kinship with Deity. 
By the image of God in man was understood 
an inalienable heritage, a spiritual or ethical 
birthright, which could not be forfeited. Deity 
and humanity were not alien one to the other ; 
and it was their constitutional relationship 
which made the incarnation not only possible, 

1 Contra Gentes, c. 34. 



36 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

but a necessary factor in the process of 
redemption." x 

But with the advent of the great theologian 
on whose thought has been modelled the creed 
of all the Western branch of the Christian 
Church, there came a new spirit into the Church. 
The doctrine of original sin, imputed sin, total 
depravity, dates clearly from the mind of Augus- 
tine. According to its terms, humanity is abso- 
lutely separated from God in the sin of Adam. 
The guilt of sin involves the whole family of 
man. The effect of that sin was to destroy 
utterly in man the image of God in which man 
was created. Adam lost for himself and his 
descendants the relationship in which he was 
begotten; and through the corrupt and utterly 
depraved natures they inherit from their ances- 
tor, human souls are cut off from God ; and 
everything akin to the divine in reason, in con- 
science, in will, is utterly destroyed. . They 
are children of God no longer, they are only 
His creatures. And it is only by the ab- 
solute will of God, electing whom He will, 
rejecting whom He chooses, that souls are re- 
ceived again into that union with God which 

1 Bohlen Lectures, p. 177. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 37 

was forfeited by the first man, and denied to 
all his posterity. 

Such was Augustinianism. And such is the 
subtle and misleading falsehood with which the 
soul of Christendom has wrestled from that day 
to this. It was perpetuated in the theology of 
the Church of Rome, and spun out in the meta- 
physics of the Schoolmen. It glowered in the 
awful blasphemies of Calvinism, and the revolt 
of Wesley and Whitefield was not strong enough 
to break its malign spell. And not until the 
intellectual and religious life of the nineteenth 
century, stirring in the thought of Germany and 
England and America, reverted to the earlier 
type of Christianity as interpreted by the great 
fathers, was the bondage of Christendom to the 
Bishop of Hippo broken, and the larger measure 
of the gospel doctrine of the Divine fatherhood 
comprehended anew. 

The significance of the theological movement 
of the present age is scarcely understood as yet, 
even by those most active in promoting it. But 
it begins to be clear that it is a return to the 
faith of the first three centuries in the Church's 
history. The orthodoxy of Augustine cannot 
live in the air of this centurv. Its errors and 



38 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

exaggerations are destined to die out before the 
thoughts that fill men's souls to-day. The or- 
thodoxy -of Clement and of Origen, coming as it 
,does into the closest relations of sympathy and 
support with the truths which science has most 
firmly established, is renewing its hold after cen- 
turies of condemnation. And in no respect is 
this generation more thoroughly in accord with 
it than in its assertion of the Divine fatherhood, 
and the persistence of God's image in the human 
soul, under all the ruin and demoralization of 
sin. 

VII. — Divine Fatherhood and Divine Love. 

It is impossible for the student of this truth 
as it has been revealed to humanity by Jesus 
Christ to escape one or two leading and impres- 
sive facts, which are necessary inferences from 
this attitude of God to man. We have presented 
the scriptural testimony to the truth entirely 
from one side, because the denial of the univer- 
sality of the fatherhood is based upon the change 
which has taken place in human nature since 
the fall. The entire weight of the imposing 
structure of text and argument in refutation of 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 39 

God's universal fatherhood rests upon the as- 
sumption that the Divine image in man has been 
utterly lost, and that this loss annihilates the 
relationship. But is that true ? Is there not 
another side from which we are bound to ap- 
proach this relationship in order to discover its 
full significance ? Fatherhood has two sides. 
It depends as much upon the nature €>f God as 
it does upon the nature of man. It rests not 
alone upon the perpetuity of the Divine image in 
man, but also upon the Divine nature in whose 
image man was created. God is man's father, 
by virtue of what He is in His own infinite na- 
ture. The creation of man was the spontaneous 
act of the Divine will. God made man in His 
image, of His own choice and by His own voli- 
tion, and in creating him assumed a relationship 
toward him. Now that relationship no act of 
man can annul. That is true of the earthly 
manifestation of this divine relationship. He 
who begets a child is always and forever that 
child's father ; and there are obligations, as there 
are sentiments, growing out of that fact, which 
no act of the child can destroy or alter or 
modify. Once a father, man is always a father. 
For though he seek to evade his duties, or with- 



40 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

hold his love, he cannot abolish the unalterable 
fact that he is a father, and that his own act has 
sealed upon him certain unchangeable obliga- 
tions. More than that ; if he be a true father 
there is nothing which can make him change his 
relationship to his child. He finds it ingrained 
in his verv nature. He must be a father to 

a/ 

that child, no matter how the child deports him- 
self in return. The child may lose all semblance 
of likeness to his father ; he may become abso- 
lutely imbecile, and be bereft of reason, intelli- 
gence, and every mental likeness to his parent. 
Still, his father will not be the less his father, 
nor less under bond to care for and protect his 
unhappy child. That child may fall into the 
lowest degradation, may lose all moral likeness 
to his kindred, may sear his conscience and 
blunt every spiritual perception. Still, that does 
not shift the relationship, does not alter the obli- 
gations of fatherhood. These persist, unalter- 
able by any act of the child ; and the nobler the 
mould in which that parental nature is cast, and 
the more Christ-like it is, the more impossible 
does it become for it to change its attitude and 
be anything but the friend, the guardian, the 
lover of its offspring. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 41 

That this is the central principle of the Divine 
fatherhood ; that it rests on the spontaneous 
disposition of God toward His children, and not 
on any variable or fluctuating condition of the 
soul of man ; that God fathers man's spirit be- 
cause of what He is in His own infinite nature, 
— we find corroboration in the Christian doctrine 
of the atonement. That dogma describes work 
which God has done for man, not by virtue of 
anything man has done or failed to do, but by 
reason of the love for man which wells up out 
of God's own inexhaustible being. God sends 
His Son to save the world, not for anything man 
has done, but because He loves man, and de- 
sires to rescue him from the bondage of sin. 
44 God was in Christ reconciling the world unto 
Himself." x " But God commendeth His love 
toward us in that while w r e were yet sinners 
Christ died for us." 2 " In this was manifested 
the love of God toward us, because that God 
sent His only begotten Son into the world, that 
we might live through Him. Herein is love, not 
that we loved God, but that He loved us, and 
sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." 3 

1 2 Corinthians v. 19. 2 Romans v. 8. 

3 1 John iv. 9, 10. 



42 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

The ground of the atonement is the love, un- 
changing and unchangeable, which God enter- 
tains toward those whom He has created in His 
ow^n image. The impulse to save and redeem 
the souls of men comes from the spontaneous 
and irresistible love and grace of God the Fa- 
ther. Upon that fact, finally, God's fatherhood 
rests ; and nothing can change it except the 
annihilation of His children, so that there is 
nothing for God to be a father to ; or the utter 
transformation of His own nature. 

This, after all has been said, is the real bond 
of unity which makes a single family of the 
human race. This is the great spiritual fact, 
the inner truth which stands in such close rela- 
tions to the outward signs of kinship which 
mark our race. The anatomist takes man's 
frame to pieces, and finds in its very structure 
something which sets him off in a different 
group from every other form of organic life. 
The antiquarian hunts out his remains, his early 
arts and simple skill, and traces common needs 
and common modes of meeting them. The his- 
torian recognizes common aims running through 
all his attempts at building states and establish- 
ing his social life. Philanthropy points to his 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 43 

suffering, counts his sighs, and notes the tears 
which flow alike from all human eyes, and bids 
us mark that men share a common lot of bless- 
ing or of bane. But these, after all, are re- 
semblances which serve to group men by their 
outward peculiarities. They form a sort of arti- 
ficial system, so long as we rest in them and go 
no deeper. But the gospel, announcing the fact 
of man's sonship to God, accounts for these 
likenesses, as well as discovers the real source 
of the unity of the race. In that thrilling fact 
we have a reason why one man is like another. 
It is for the same reason that all the children 
in one family have blue eyes, or light hair, or a 
fair complexion. The mark of their parentage 
is stamped upon them. That fundamental fact 
accounts for all the others. And this grand 
fundamental truth that all men are God's chil- 
dren explains all man's various struggles, his 
yearning heart, his creative mind, his aspiring 
instincts, his unfolding affections. It is the 
God-nature working to full maturity. Children 
are not related because they look alike; they 
look alike because they are related. Human be- 
ings, too, are not called brethren because they 
have so much in common. They possess these 



44 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

common traits because they are brethren, chil- 
dren of one Father. The " touch of nature " 
which " makes the whole world kin " is the like- 
ness of man to his Maker. And it is an un- 
speakable privilege to us all, who are so often 
classified according to our weaknesses and our 
sins, and reminded of our likeness to each other 
on the ground of our universal sinfulness and 
sorrow, to come up to the summit of this truth, 
which lifts us so high and gives us so noble a 
dignity. Thank God, the real reason why we are 
alike is not because we are so easily tempted, 
not because we love evil, not because we are 
ignorant, weak, or wicked, but because we are 
the children of the Most High; because one 
God hath created us. 

The line of kinship, then, includes all human 
souls. It makes no boundary between races or 
nations. It classes the savage in his imperfection 
with a Plato or a Wilberforce. For the savage 
has a soul — nay, is a soul — as truly as the 
sage or the reformer. He bears God's likeness ; 
he is sustained by God's life ; he is the recipient 
of His love. The powers of heaven and earth, 
visible and invisible, are enlisted for him as 
truly as they are for the saints oi* the seraphim. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 45 

God looks with impartial tenderness on the 
dweller by the tropic Amazon, and the denizen 
of smoky London. The sun that girdles the 
earth every day looks on no face of all the hu- 
man kind which does not share the common 
birth-mark. The sailor on the reeling deck, and 
he who for his sake watches the light upo$ the 
solitary reef ; the artisan at his toil, the soldier 
pouring out his blood in battle, and the little 
babe upon its mother's breast; the judge upon 
the bench, and the unhappy convicts in scores of 
dreary prisons ; prince and peasant ; statesman 
and serf ; the godly and the sinful ; the youth 
and the grandsire, — these all being the offspring 
of one Creator are His souls, His sons and 
daughters. No matter whether a man dwells in 
high places or low, whether he keeps the law of 
God or breaks it, still he is God's child always 
and forever. Manhood itself is the divine qual- 
ity, — the trait which links us to our God. 

It follows from these premises that whatever 
conclusions as to the destiny of souls are drawn 
from the nature of God and His dispositions 
toward men, cannot be undermined by any as- 
sault upon the relationship which is assumed in 
calling God the father of all souls, because those 



46 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

conclusions rest upon no mere playing with 
words and logical or theological niceties over 
terms. The faith in the final triumph of God 
does not depend upon the name we may give to 
God, but upon the love which He bears to souls, — 
a love which makes the name of " father " more 
expressive of His real attitude to men than any 
other known to them. If men choose to quibble 
over the doctrine of the fatherhood of God, and 
cling to the doctrine of total depravity, and in- 
sist that a corrupt soul is not a child of God, 
they are welcome to do so. They do not touch 
the great central dogma of Christian faith, on 
which Universalism plants itself and defies dis- 
lodgement. That truth is : That God loves men, 
all men, sinful men, depraved men ; loves them 
so much that He sent His Son to save them ; 
loves them without return and without recogni- 
tion ; loves them with a love which could only 
find its adequate expression in the cross on Cal- 
vary ; loves them with a love which is without 
variableness or shadow of turning. His love is 
unaffected by the sin of man, which only rouses 
it to sacrifice for the sinner's sake. And His 
love does not rest upon the maintenance of a 
fixed and definite likeness of an image to its 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 47 

original. It grows out of the self-sustained na- 
ture of the everlasting God, which nature is, in 
its last essence, a nature of love. In other 
words, and briefly, the love of God does not 
grow out of the fatherhood of God, but the 
fatherhood of God has its root in the love of 
God. And since the New Testament expressly 
declares the love of God for the sinful soul, is it 
a great stretch of interpretation to infer the 
fatherhood of God from the same declarations ? 
At all events it makes but little difference 
whether we rest our faith in the blessed destiny 
on the fatherhood of God or the love of God. 
Both describe the attitude and relation of God 
to man, out of which it is safe to infer that good 
must come at last to all. 

This is the great truth to which the mission 
of Jesus upon earth bears conspicuous witness. 
His whole life was an embodiment of God's dis- 
position toward men, and His death set forth yet 
more gloriously the sacred fact of God's paternal 
love. In life and in death Jesus was testifying 
to the fatherhood of God, and to the affection- 
ate care which that relationship implies. And 
the peculiar and salient feature of the Divine 
love which Jesus manifested to man was its free 



48 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

and unconstrained quality. Everything about 
Christ's life for man, every sacrifice and every 
duty, was a voluntary gift to humanity. His will 
was under no duress. He was acting freely. 
He made a free offering of Himself to the cause 
of human salvation, — the reconciliation of the 
child to his Father, the restoration of harmony 
between earth and heaven. But in our Saviour 
we are taught to see our God ; in what He did 
for us, what God is ever doing for us ; in the 
attitude of His spirit toward us, a sign and proof 
of God's eternal bearing toward His offspring. 
As Christ's love for the world depended on 
nothing that the world had done for Him, so 
the Father's love of His children depends not 
on their nature or works, but upon His own. 
He loves them spontaneously, because it is His 
nature to love them. So that however man 
may be disposed toward God, the Father never 
changes His disposition toward man. Even in 
his sins and wanderings God is loving him, 
though varying the mode of manifesting that 
love to suit the needs of the soul. Jesus dying 
for a world which had rejected and crucified 
Him, Jesus praying in His last moments for 
the very men whose sins hung Him on the cross, 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 49 

is an everlasting type of the Father whose love 
is equally bestowed on all mankind. 

This is the very essence of New Testament 
teaching. The apostle Paul declares that " God 
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Him- 
self," * — a plain announcement that God takes 
the initiative in this holy work. He says again, 
" God commendeth (or proveth) His love toward 
us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ 
died for us." 2 John says : " In this was mani- 
fested the love of God toward us, because that 
God sent His only begotten Son into the world, 
that we might live through Him. Herein is 
love, not that we loved God, but that He loved 
us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for 
our sins." 3 Jesus Himself accounts for His own 
presence in this world in the words, " For God so 
loved the world." 4 The very essence of God's 
love is its spontaneousness, which lifts it above 
all possible conditions, all limitation by man's 
sinfulness, and makes it dependent only on the 
nature of the Father. 

The parables of Jesus always enforce the 
same truth. Thev are full of this doctrine of a 

1 2 Corinthians v. 19. 2 Romans v. 8. 

3 1 John iv. 10. 4 John iii. 16. 



50 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

love in God's heart which antedates and tran- 
scends any goodness and any merit on man's part, 
and is self-originating and self-subsistent. That 
wonderful series of parables which seems to 
speak the very heart of the Master, and illus- 
trates the inner spirit of the gospel, — the stories 
of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Piece of Silver, and 
the Prodigal Son, — these are all so many illus- 
trations of the boundless and spontaneous nature 
of Divine love, a love which does not need to be 
won by service, nor bought with the price of love 
returned, since it is continually anticipating our 
affection and our duty, and far outrunning the 
swiftness of our gratitude. The shepherd is 
following the sheep in his wanderings. The 
woman is searching for the lost money. The 
father is loving the prodigal so dearly that 
he watches for him and sees him yet a great 
way off and runs to meet him. In every case 
there is the implication that God's love is origi- 
nal and spontaneous, lying behind all the agen- 
cies and the measures by which man's salvation 
is wrought. Nor can the inference be avoided, 
that as long as the nature of God endures, this 
love will urge Him to labors for man's good, — 
labors which can no more be limited to the brief 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 51 

years of this life than the power of gravitation 
can be confined to our planet. 



VIII. — Fatherhood and Human Depravity. 

But we are not willing to rest the matter here, 
for if we did it might seem that we conceded 
by faint implication the doctrine that human 
nature has lost all semblance of the Divine na- 
ture, and that in it the image of God is totally 
destroyed. That we are far from doing. This 
is the dark, discredited doctrine of total deprav- 
ity, disguised, softened, asserted indirectly, but 
at bottom the ancient discreditable falsehood as 
to human nature which has weighed down the 
theology of fourteen centuries. No clear-sighted 
student of theology will for a moment deny the 
corruption, nay, the depravity of human nature, 
nor the stern law which entails the curse by 
heredity. All that is conceded. Rut to say that 
this depravity can totally wreck God's image in 
the soul, that it obliterates the very semblance 
of the Divine in the nature of man, that it wholly 
defiles him " in all faculties and parts of soul and 
body," is utterly inconsistent with the Scrip- 
ture we have cited, and is foreign to the whole 



52 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

tenor of theological teaching up to the time of 
Augustine. When we speak of the image of God 
in which man was created we must admit, as 
Dr. Mark Hopkins truly says, that " the image 
of God to be thus created was not anything in- 
cidental or that could be separated from man, 
but must consist in something so essential to 
him that if he should lose it he would cease to 
be a man. ... So long as man continues to be 
rational, moral, and free, and hence capable of 
knowing God, he will be in His image; and 
when he ceases to be rational, moral, and free he 
will no longer be man." a Or in the fine phrase 
of Canon Liddon: "The fall of man consists 
rather in the privation of God's supernatural 
grace than in a positive corruption of all his 
faculties, such as has been imagined by some 
modern divines ; and as the doctrine was under- 
stood by the ancient Church, the fall left human 
nature dismantled indeed, but something less 
than a shapeless ruin. ... In each of Adam's 
children the Divine image was still traceable in 
its twofold features of intelligence and freedom, 
though the one was darkened, and the other 

1 Scriptural Idea of Man, p. 26. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 53 

impaired." l That is the statement of one of the 
most eminent and profound of English theolo- 
gians ; and it may well serve as a summary of 
the doctrine of this thesis. Even so gloomy and 
pessimistic a Methodist as Dr. L. T. Townsend 
concedes " the fact of the existence of an inher- 
ing or adhering goodness in human nature, which 
may be termed germinal in the sense of possess- 
ing undeveloped elements." 2 

Let us note one other important corollary of 
the truth we are discussing. If it were true that 
there is no trace left in sinful men of the Divine 
image, there could be no ground of appeal to 
man to bring him to repentance. There is no 
use in calling a physician to restore health in 
an organism that is absolutely destroyed. So if 
the mind has parted with reason, there is no 
ground on which to stand in appealing to the 
darkened intellect. If, then, there were nothing 
in man which allied him to God, no common life 
by virtue of his descent from Deity, then there is 
no power conceivable which could make man 
understand the call God makes upon him to 
repent, amend his ways, and take his place as a 

1 University Sermons, first series, p. 304, 

2 Lost Forever, p. 183. 



54 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

child in God's blessed company of the redeemed. 
The nature of man, with its latent spiritual pow- 
ers, the undeveloped image of the Father, is the 
basis of God's work in developing him into the 
divine life. If it were not for that germinal na- 
ture which answers to the appeal of its Creator, 
man could never exert the slightest effort of will 
toward his own salvation ; and if it were true 
that the Divine image is utterly destroyed by sin, 
then He who came to save sinners might as well 
have been sent to a race of graven images or a 
family of pine-trees. " The human heart," says 
Newman Smyth, " with all its passions and im- 
purities, is still the truest mirror in which we 
can behold the invisible God." And it is this 
God-likeness in our hearts which makes them 
answer at all to the persuasions of the Holy 
Spirit. If the germ and elements of eternal life 
had not been folded within our hearts in our 
natural birth, they would never be unfolded in the 
new birth, — the birth from above. When man 
turns away from sin and seeks the face of God, 
his own nature is answering that Nature in whose 
image he was formed, and the soul is rising into 
its own true life. 

Universalism, like all kindred phases of the 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 55 

new theology, puts the doctrine of regeneration 
on a firmer basis in reason and in Scripture than 
it ever had on the artificial foundations reared bv 
Augustinianism. For it is asserted as a process 
involving known laws and analogies, just as 
Christ delivered it to man, and not as a device 
of spiritual magic, or extraordinary and irregu- 
lar exercise of Divine force. It is asserted as a 
necessary step in man's induction into the higher 
life, as a necessity of the soul. Man cannot 
rise upward into the life of the spiritual world 
until he has been born of the Spirit, any more 
than he can enter the natural world till he has 
been born of the flesh. But the second birth is 
as much a universal necessity as the first, and, 
like the birth in the body, is, in the words of Dr. 
Munger, " a constructive, not a reconstructive 
process." It is the step which every sinner will 
at last be constrained to take, not by the arbitrary 
will of Deity, but by the necessities of his own 
nature, — the law of that constitution in which 
he was formed, when God proposed to gather to- 
gether in one " all things in Christ." For this 
great fact and law of spiritual life, Universalism 
has borne no uncertain testimony. The neces- 
sity of regeneration has never been denied ; and 



56 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

least of all is its denial involved in the universal 
fatherhood, which is the very corner-stone on 
which it rests. Universalism simply asserts for 
all men, as a law of the life of the soul, what the 
traditional Christianity limits to the few and the 
favored. 

It is the strength of the new theology that it 
places this great fact of the spiritual life upon 
an impregnable basis. It treats regeneration as 
a normal and natural fact of man's experience, 
as much in the nature of things as the change 
of the embryo into the child, and of the child 
into the man. Nay, more ; we may use the 
terms of science, and assert that Christianity 
declares what we call regeneration to be the 
evolution of a higher humanity out of a lower. 

There is another form which is sometimes used 
as an alternative reading of the passage in which 
Jesus describes the new birth, which renders 
it, " Except a man be born from above, he can- 
not see the kingdom of God." * That explains 
the place of this great experience in the cate- 
gories of science. Every advance of species 
from a lower to a higher grade, or every crea- 
tion of a higher to supersede a lower, is an in- 

1 John iii. 3. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 57 

flowing of life from above, — of the Life from 
above which creates us all. 

In the exercise of His fatherly love and the 
unfolding of His paternal providence toward 
man, God brings him at last to this crowning 
step in the long ascent of evolution. It will be 
the highest in all probability that we shall ever 
see taken in this world. It will be the process by 
which this earth shall receive a new race, as far 
above the man of the present age as he is above 
the cave-dweller and the bushman. This is the 
goal of God's fatherly purpose for man ; and this 
goal is to be attained through the spiritual re- 
newal and uplifting of man which is called the 
birth from above. 

IX. — Fatherhood and the Problem of 
Evil. 

No survey of the doctrine of the fatherhood of 
God, even the most cursory, can leave untouched 
its relations to the existence of evil. The pres- 
ence of this element in the creation is a fact 
always hard to reconcile with the goodness of 
the Divine nature. This was the problem which 
tried the faithful heart of Job, and is the refrain 



58 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

which runs through that sublime epic of suffer- 
ing, which has anticipated all that Hartmann 
or Schopenhauer or Mill or Ingersoll ever al- 
leged against the doctrine of the Divine love 
and fatherhood. This is the problem which 
presented itself to the mind of Paul when he 
made that immortal answer, — the only possible 
solution and the only needful one : " For the 
creature was made subject to vanity, not will- 
ingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected 
the same in hope." * For whatever may be said 
of any other theories concerning evil and the 
Divine love, it is certain that there is one which 
offers a reasonable and consistent interpretation 
of this mystery, so far as any is possible in our 
present condition of ignorance and limitation. 
No man can do more than indicate a rational 
theory on this matter. For the full demonstra- 
tion of its truth we must await the fulfilment 
of the ages. " The crucial test of a thoughtful 
mind," says some one, " is a sense of the mys- 
tery of life." But there is an appreciable relief 
to that sense when it approaches the facts of 
evil and of sin in some such faith as the com- 
mon-sense of the age is coming to have in the 

1 Romans viii. 20. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 59 

teachings of the gospel, — that this is a growing 
world, developing toward some high end whose 
attainment shall explain the windings of the 
way by which it was reached. If we can see 
any beneficent end to moral evil, both for the 
creation as a whole and for every individual in 
it, we can reconcile evil with the goodness of 
God. If we find reasons for believing that such 
an issue is possible for every human soul, we 
can believe the fact compatible w r ith the father- 
hood of God. Present evil is perfectly consistent 
with infinite power and love if it can be shown 
that it is temporary, transitional, — a phase of 
existence, and not a finality. The pain, the 
strife, the suffering of the world's early age 
become less formidable in their challenge to 
faith, if we see in them the " growing pains " 
of an expanding creation. The feuds and fight- 
ings which have cursed the past seem less hard 
to reconcile with a benevolent purpose when we 
see how they have paved the way for an era w r hen 
wars shall cease. The cloud of personal bereave- 
ment and grief has a silver lining when we have 
learned how afflictions purify and deepen the 
springs of life. So, too, if there is any fruitage 
of salvation to grow out of penalty and retribu- 



60 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

tion, it is not hard to believe penalty salutary 
and beneficent. And if it appear that out of 
the deep furrowings of sin there may spring up 
better dispositions, and the wrath of man, under 
the care and influence of God, turn to praise, 
then the deeps of hell itself are not profound 
enough to hide the fact of a paternal purpose, 
both wise and loving, in the moral economy of 
human life. Now this solution of the dark 
problem is proffered us to-day, not only by the 
champions of religious faith, but also by the 
very high-priest of the scientific philosophy. 
" Evil," says Herbert Spencer, " perpetually tends 
to disappear ; " and he adds a graphic summary 
of reasons why " the things we call evil and 
immorality must disappear." l Mr. John Piske, 
too, in his remarkable monograph on " The 
Destiny of Man," declares : " Strife and sorrow 
shall disappear, peace and love shall reign su- 
preme. . . . The kingdoms of this world shall 
become the kingdom of Christ, and He shall 
reign forever and ever." 2 And what is this 
but the teaching of the great Apostle himself, 
when he declares, "The creature itself also 
shall be delivered from the bondage of corrup- 

1 Social Statics, pp. 74, 78. 2 The Destiny of Man, p. 118. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 61 

tion into the glorious liberty of the children of 
God"? 1 

In this thought of the creation and all its evils, 
we have ample ground on which to stand in faith 
in the fatherhood and love of God, working from 
age to age for the perfecting and blessing of His 
creation. Once admit the thought that all the 
past and all the present are looking forward ; 
building up powers and resources for the future 
to use and draw upon ; training and disciplining 
intuitions and aptitudes, senses, functions, voli- 
tions ; laying deep courses of foundation-stone 
on which to raise the fair structure of a better, 
a holier life, — and we have a ground on which 
to stand in hope, If it be allowed us to say and 
believe that the universe is not stationary but 
growing, its destiny one of peace and harmony, 
its sufferings incidental to a higher enjoyment, 
we can afford to suspend our gloomy judgments, 
give faith her rights, and frankly facing every 
mysterious evil, from the crushing of a fly to 
the overwhelming of a nation, still believe 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete. 

1 Romans viii. 21. 



62 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

11 That not a worm is cloven in vain, 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain." 

But here let it be said, with the utmost em- 
phasis, that it is upon this theory of the Divine 
government alone that the Divine goodness can 
be vindicated or the Divine fatherhood main- 
tained. The assumption that evil must eternally 
exist, a blot upon the creation and a drawback 
to its harmony ; that sin is destined to prolong 
itself, contrary to the will of God and the prayers 
and struggles of humanity, — this thought under- 
mines all the faith we are striving to maintain 
in God's loving rule, and brings us face to face 
with most despairing conclusions in regard to 
God's ability or His desire. Eternal sin and 
eternal penalty, if they be facts, are utterly un- 
mitigated by any ray of light. They are a black 
curse on the creation. They are a reproach to 
God's love ; for they are without redeeming 
features, without purpose, and without results. 
They load souls with pain which does them no 
good, which only exasperates and maddens, 
without the least tendency either to redeem or 
to destroy. And so, like any theory about 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 63 

natural evil which makes it appear a perpetual 
element in the creation, they are incompatible 
with a benevolent scheme of things, and, by con- 
sequence, with a benevolent Creator and Ruler. 

It is the privilege, then, of believers in the 
gospel of Christ and the gospel of modern sci- 
ence to see that through all the woe and want 
and weariness of creation there runs a thread of 
blessing. Nature indeed has a hand of iron 
under her velvet glove. Her face is as stern as 
it is beautiful. Her severities press upon us on 
all sides, and they are unsparing, rigorous, in- 
variable. They buffet us in her piercing winds ; 
they beat upon us in her withering heats ; they 
smite us in her fierce lightnings. Her laws are 
pitiless, and her agents titanic and remorseless. 
She inflicts a thousand austerities, which at first 
sight seem like cruelties. The story of evolution 
is a tale of endless conflict and violence. Prog- 
ress is a terrible struggle for supremacy. The 
way of salvation, the path to sainthood itself, is 
rough and thorny, rugged with sorrows and 
with denials. But that is only the background 
of the pattern which the Eternal Mind is weav- 
ing on the clashing looms of life ; and he who 
looks with true insight already sees gleaming 



64 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

threads falling into shapes of beauty and of 
light. The true meaning of pain is blessing. 
We do not know how evil came into this world. 
We know not why God could not have made us 
saints without making us suffer first. We dare 
not judge the Almighty and His purposes and 
methods by the poor, blind reasonings of our 
human minds. But this we know, that all pain 
is not punishment; that suffering bears in its 
bosom the seeds of a diviner state ; that our 
crosses raise us to our crowns ; that the severi- 
ties we endure all issue in a higher and a happier 
life. The human heart is stronger than any of 
the forces which hurt it. There is no adversity, 
no form of suffering or of pain, over which we 
may not see some souls rising in triumph, happy 
in spite of life's severity. And one single in- 
stance is enough to prove that pain is consistent 
with happiness, and that severity is no contra- 
diction of love. 

X. — Fatherhood and Retribution. 

Turn, in attestation of this truth, to the his- 
tory of human experience, in connection with 
the fact of retribution. The keenest sufferings, 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 65 

the most awful severities, inflicted upon human 
souls are those which wickedness produces, — 
are the sequences of sin. And these, unhap- 
pily, have nearly always been interpreted as the 
tokens of Divine anger, — an anger which was 
without mercy and without love, inflicting ven- 
geance for its own sake, and gloating over suf- 
fering as aimless as it was cruel. But is this 
the only possible view of the severities with 
which God visits sin ? Is there no benevolence 
in them ? Are they necessarily the outcome of 
harshness and of hate ? Suppose they should 
be the sharp thorns of the hedges God has set 
up to keep us in the way of virtue. Suppose 
they should be the uneasy bed on which no 
wicked soul can lie in peace. That would be no 
impossible interpretation of them ; but it would 
lend to them at once a new meaning pregnant 
with hope and bright with love. 

If God be a true Father, He will use all the 
devices of His Divine economy to prevent misery 
and foster happiness. His laws will be framed 
so as to secure that happiness. Our good will 
lie in the observance of these laws. So that to 
attain our good, we must be kept from breaking 
the laws which insure it to us. This makes hap- 

5 



66 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

piness the same thing as harmony with God's 
will, and unhappiness discord with that will. 
The labor, then, of the Divine love will be to 
keep us in the way of righteousness. Every 
device which wisdom and affection can suggest 
will be used to secure this end. Every induce- 
ment will be offered to obedience ; every deter- 
rent will be held up to disobedience. This we 
find to be the law of the moral universe. All 
the forces of resistance are concentrated upon 
man to restrain him from sin. Every possible 
inducement is offered him to walk in the way 
where his virtue and his happiness both lie. 
When a man attempts to pass the boundaries 
of right, he encounters some form of pain. The 
farther he goes, the more he suffers. Like one 
who tries to penetrate a thicket, and gets him- 
self into worse tangles with every step he goes ; 
like a man beating out to sea against a heavy 
gale, who finds every wave he meets worse than 
the last, — is he who deserts the strait and narrow 
way for some cross-cut to indulgence, some ex- 
cursion into the seductive fields of pleasant vice. 
He involves himself in worse difficulties and 
severer pains the farther he goes. God has no 
pity on him while he strays ; or rather, He is so 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 67 

pitiful that He will use any severity to keep him 
from straying. He rains misfortunes on him, 
follows him with disasters, multiplies the dangers 
which infest his path. Of all possible courses 
open to the human heart, God has made the 
virtuous course always the easiest. Observe, we 
do not need to say, what is not true, that right- 
eousness is easy. But it is easier than sin. That 
is an unalterable law of the creation. For every 
difficulty and every pain in the path of the right- 
eous, you may count a score in that hard way 
in which transgressors walk. If it is hard to be 
good, it is harder still to be bad. And any man 
who yields to temptation under the impression 
that it is easier to do that than to resist, makes 
as serious a mistake as he who should decide 
that it was easier to lie in bed and see his house 
burn down about him than to get up and put out 
the fire. 

There is a favorite principle of modern sci- 
ence which, like all the truth of a real science, 
finds an application in this realm of life. The 
fact we are affirming is the spiritual side of a 
great natural law. It is a favorite doctrine of 
Mr. Spencer and his school, that life develops 
along the line of least resistance. Every com- 



68 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

bination among the forces which have given us 
this earth and the life there is in it, is deter- 
mined by the escape of motion in the direction 
where there is the strongest force or the least 
opposition. What the religious man calls the 
" course of Providence," the man of science calls 
the operation of natural force along the line of 
least resistance. All the structural changes of 
the earth, the progress and modification of so- 
cial life, the development of physical peculiari- 
ties in the individual, and even the growth of 
moral habits, depend upon this broad principle. 
No doubt this is a generalization as true in the 
moral world as in the physical. The direction 
of Divine Providence is along the line of least re- 
sistance. Indeed, we ought rather to say that 
the line of the least resistance is the path Divine 
Providence has already marked out for itself. 

The law that the fittest only survive has a moral 
manifestation. Stated in the terms of theology, 
it means the triumph of good over evil. The 
environment which God has created for the hu- 
man soul is especially calculated to preserve good 
and destroy evil. The severities of Heaven lie 
in the direction of sin, or the backward step of 
the soul. And as good is the only possible at- 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 69 

tribute which can harmonize with a Divine en- 
vironment, we may regard the very arrangement 
of the creation as a pledge of its final triumph. 

Here, then, we have an explanation, and in 
some sense a justification, of the presence of 
severity in retribution as an element in God's 
fatherhood. It is the force which resists man's 
moral retrogression. It is the barrier which the 
Heavenly Father erects on either side of the way 
to keep us in a straight path. If we will wander, 
He provides that we shall not be unwarned and 
unrestrained ; there shall be some admonitory 
experience, something to startle or deter. If 
gentle measures fail, then there shall be sterner 
ones. It is far better that we should be thus 
buffeted by God's severities than that we should 
go unhindered to destruction. " Pervading all 
nature," says Spencer, " we may see at work a 
stern discipline which is a little cruel that it 
may be very kind." That sentence is a key to 
interpret the asperities of our moral experience. 
God wounds that He may heal. He smites that 
He may uplift. He will save man all the trouble 
and the suffering that He can. He will make 
our lives as happy as we will allow Him to. 
And whenever a human soul is blind enough 



70 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. , 

to believe its own way best, God is not slow to 
disclose to it the awful blunder it has made. 

And so, if not now, yet sometime, we shall 
learn to bless the Power which has led us 
through experiences which try and hurt us with 
their severity. It would be our way to give 
up the weary march of life, but God whips us 
into action with a lash of stinging needs. We 
would stray into the fields of illicit pleasure, 
but we find them thick with thistles. We might 
be too indolent to enter in at an open heaven, if 
God did not send untiring angels to rouse our 
sluggard wills, to spur us to the march, and to 
chase our footsteps with a relentless persistence 
to the heavenly goal. These powers that seem 
so adverse are the sworn allies of love. Even 
the iron hand of retribution is the grasp of the 
Father setting itself the faster as the soul sinks 
in its sins. God might have let us go astray un- 
checked. H^ might have held off His restraints 
while we went plunging down the declivities of 
sin, from bad to worse, from woe to woe, down 
into infinite depths of ruin. But our Father 
loves us too well to lose us. When leniencv 
would be destruction, He is too kind to spare us. 
Hence this iron grip, this unfaltering severity, 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 71 

this galling stringency of restraint, are the attri- 
butes of the eternal and unalterable love of God. 
And under all these disguises the tender father- 
hood of God works for our good, — works to re- 
strain and to correct ; works to uplift and to 
chasten ; works to breed in us the abhorrence of 
evil ; works to tear away the illusions of temp- 
tation ; works to conduct us through the very 
pains of purgatory and the pangs of perdition, 
into the glory of the blessed life. 

" And since these biting frosts but kill 
Some tares in me which choke or spill 
That seed Thou sow'st, blest be Thy skill! 

" Blest be Thy dew and blest Thy frost, 
And happy I to be so crost, 
And cured by crosses at Thy cost. ,, 

How clearly this beneficence of suffering ap- 
pears in the case of our Ignorance and its con- 
sequences. There is no case in which it is 
any harder to justify the severity of Providence 
than just here. Why, we ask ourselves, should 
men suffer consequences of which they were ig- 
norant when they incurred them ? Why should 
we be in pain for what we did not know ? A 
man swallows a noxious herb which he did 
not know was a poison, and suffers a linger- 
ing sickness in consequence. Another ignores 



72 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

the laws of health, and after an undue strain 
from excessive work, falls a victim to paraly- 
sis. And we secretly think a little reproachfully 
of a constitution of things which is so hard 
upon ignorance and inadvertence. But mark the 
benevolence underneath this apparent harshness. 
Surely it were a sad fate for man if he were 
to live in ignorance. He never can live his 
best life or reap his highest enjoyments until 
he has overcome the drawbacks of his own 
lack of knowledge. Man must be forced to 
seek wisdom, light, and truth, or he fails of 
his own heaven. But the fact that ignorance 
is misery is the spur which drives him out of 
it. " If to be ignorant were as safe as to be 
wise," says a keen student of human nature, 
" no one would become wise. And all meas- 
ures which tend to put ignorance on a par 
with wisdom inevitably check the growth of 
wisdom." And so these penalties attaching to 
blindness teach us to open our eyes. These 
sharp experiences of our ignorance whet all the 
faculties to a keener judgment. Unpi tying as 
it looks, it is nevertheless merciful to let men 
suffer for their ignorance, in order that they 
may become wise. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 73 

Take, for example, the severity of the ad- 
ministration of Heaven in its dealings with 
Poverty. Why should it fare so hard in this 
world with one who is simply unthrifty, or care- 
less, or short-sighted, or unfortunate? What 
do these distresses of poverty mean ? It is no 
help to the sympathizing heart that we lay the 
burden of explanation on the back of some gen- 
eral law, and say that it is the working out 
of some great principle of supply and demand, 
or the forcing of the weakest to the wall, in 
order that the strongest may survive. That 
does not ease the problem in the least. Want 
and cold, starvation and disease, are just as 
gaunt and dreadful after this explanation as 
they were before. But how if the very law 
which bears so heavily upon the poor man 
contain in itself the secret of his own eleva- 
tion ? Remember how necessary it is for man's 
highest spiritual good that he should put him- 
self beyond the condition of precarious life, of 
living from hand to mouth. Note how his soul- 
life has grown as man has been raised above 
the miserable and degrading poverty of the 
savage. Remember how this scourge of pov- 
erty, with its raging hungers and famines, its 



74 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

nakedness and cold and exposure, has been 
the lash which has driven our race to become 
tillers and builders and weavers. Not one of 
the comforts and the elegancies of our homes 
would ever have existed if some poor savage 
had not been driven by his sufferings from 
sun and storm to build him a rude shelter, 
and so lay the corner-stone of architecture. 
The wealth of the world would never have ex- 
isted if it had not been for the poverty of the 
world. Can we not see, in the light of that 
faict, that there is a certain rude kindness even 
in this hard condition of poverty? Is it not 
made so hard precisely in order that men may 
exert themselves to get out of it ? " The power 
that moves the world everywhere," says some 
one, " is the power of need." It is the goad 
to labor. It is the spur to zeal. It drives the 
sluggard afield. It rouses the careless to take 
thought. It instructs the unskilful. It forces 
the imprudent to mend his ways. 

XI. — The Divine Fatherhood and Human 

Sorrow. 

We find moreover in human Sorrow an illus- 
tration of the principle of God's loving father- 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 75 

hood. Men often misconceive the mission of 
sorrow. They misread its Divine meaning. 
They call it punishment ; they count it a retri- 
bution ; they rebel against it as an injustice, 
trying to see in it the recompense for some 
fault of which they are not aware. But sor- 
row is not an avenger. It comes to the pure 
in heart as well as to the sinful. The Saviour 
Himself was a man of sorrows. For sorrow 
is God's refining fire. It is the cleanser of 
hearts ; it is sent to mellow the spirit, to pre- 
pare it for more hallowed life, to wear away 
the resistance our hearts make to God's good 
angels. Sorrow is like the frost that breaks 
great bowlders and cracks them into dust for 
the plant to grow in. It is like the floods 
which rise in some rivers, inundating vast 
tracts, and bearing misery and ruin at first, 
but leaving behind their deposits of rich soil. 
It is like God's lightnings which scorch through 
the air, but burn away its mephitic vapors. 
The real solace of grief lies in the sublime 
use the Heavenly Father makes of it to en- 
large our life. That is as real and true a fact 
as that the Titans of the material world have 
all been sworn to the service of God's high 



76 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

ends of blessing. And that solace is the proof 
that the severity of sorrow, too, is the severity 
of a Father's love. 

Thus we might find mercy and tenderness 
under all the severities of this life. A thread 
of love runs through the sternest trials. Under 
all the stern appearances of nature, unseen by 
the shallow and the foolish, but known to every 
sincere, loving heart which suffers, there lurks 
the sweetest blessing of life. Behind this 
" frowning providence," these relentless laws, 
these sharp distresses, our Father hides His 
everlasting love. Sorrow exists but to bless. 
Poverty does the bidding of love. The hard- 
ships of ignorance are mercies. The strictness 
of God's requirements is fully matched by the 
plenitude of the mercies which they condition. 
Even His retributions deal their blows in the 
name of a providence which works eternally for 
man's salvation. These are the glorious truths 
which shine out from behind the clouds, when 
we climb the peaks of faith and insight, and 
overlook the widest fields of truth. From that 
height we see a Father's love shining every- 
where. It illumines all the broad fields of life. 
It searches out the very deeps and lights them 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 77 

with hope. It knows no setting. It never burns 
low. It is from everlasting to everlasting. It 
is the redeeming ray which transfigures evil, 
and touches life's darkest experiences with a 
holv comfort. 

It remains for us to dwell upon one more 
thought in relation to this problem of evil in the 
creation. It is in regard to the element of time 
which enters into creative methods, and which 
renders us peculiarly liable to misjudge and 
mistake them. God works in long cycles, and 
we are still in the beginning of His mighty 
undertakings. 

The moral creation is not finished, but pro- 
gressing. Its walls are still rising. Its tow- 
ers still bear the scaffolding of the toil which 
carries it forward. Therefore do not judge the 
work till it is finished. Remember how much 
will develop as the toil goes on. Consider the 
things yet remaining undone which will change 
the aspect of the whole. Life is not to be judged 
by its present phases. The present can never 
be properly estimated if taken by itself. All 
things are to be interpreted in the light of their 
results, their final issue, their culmination. Cre- 
ation is not to be treated like a finished cathc- 



78 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

dral, whose details are all done ; much less like 
a crumbling ruin, whose disintegration has be- 
gun. It is to be viewed rather as one looks at 
the life and interests of an expanding city, or an 
undeveloped nation. It is not done, but doing. 
Its promises are as yet far greater than its ful- 
filments. It must be clothed in the light of 
hope ; for time will prove the groundlessness 
of misgivings and fears. The outcome of it all 
will satisfy yearning hearts; and the labor of 
every honest soul toward the grand result will 
"have praise of God." 

There is no truth which needs a more vigor- 
ous enforcement upon the pessimists of our day 
than this general principle. There is no answer 
to their complaints and criticisms about the 
creation except in this truth. The great mistake 
of those who seek to undermine the belief in the 
Divine fatherhood is in treating this world as 
if it were a finished product, its aims all fully 
developed, its resources all laid bare, its develop- 
ment only a circular progress in which experi- 
ence repeats itself, and no more. But if anything 
may be regarded as well established in fact as well 
as in faith, it is the scientific doctrine that this is 
a creation in process of evolution. It is a grow- 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 79 

ing crop, a web in the loom, a tale half told, a 
picture but just sketched in. Even those who 
refuse to admit that creation shows any signs 
of intelligence will allow that the bearing and 
influence of tilings present on one another can- 
not be well understood until they have worked 
out to their results, in some future time. And 
if it be conceded that there may after all be an 
intelligent purpose in Nature, — a plan by which 
all things are working, — then by so much the 
more must we perpetually hold judgment in 
suspense upon some parts of this present life. 

When an artist has projected a great picture, 
when he has completed all his studies, conceived 
his plan, and decided upon his methods, he pro- 
ceeds to make his preliminary sketches. He 
draws his various figures, in such postures and 
with such general expression as he means them 
to have in the canvas where he will finally place 
them. They are roughly done at first, and taken 
by themselves suggest no adequate notion of what 
the general composition will be. Perhaps he 
even paints each sketch with some elaboration. 
But even then it would be impossible to make 
a fair estimate of any of these carefully studied 
figures, or pronounce upon their coloring ; be- 



80 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

cause in the mind of the artist every one of these 
details has a definite relation to every other, and 
neither face nor figure, outline nor color, can be 
understood except as it is thought of in connec- 
tion with all the rest. So the real value of all 
these separate particulars cannot be estimated 
alone. But when the artist begins to draw 
them in together, when he groups these sketches 
on one surface, when he blends the colors, and 
combines them in relation to the lights and 
shadows of the picture, then one may begin 
to see, and not till then, all that the studies 
contained. They can only be interpreted by 
their final combination, their place in the finished 
picture. 

Or — to take an illustration still more analo- 
gous to the case we are seeking to make plain, 
because it is a part of a scheme which is never 
finished, but always going on — let any man of 
affairs undertake some large and complicated 
enterprise of profit, like the building of an ex- 
tensive railroad line. Now, in order to make a 
fair judgment of the various steps of that work, 
it is necessary always to keep in mind its end. 
There are many stages in the progress of the 
enterprise when it seemed more like a work of 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 81 

demolition than one of construction. The claims 
upon public and private lands for location, the 
cutting away of forests, the digging down of 
hills, the rendering of property unfit for its old 
uses, — all these seem like undoing and depre- 
ciating and destroying. The debt, too, incurred 
for construction, the mortgages given on this 
newly made property, — is it not a thriftless use 
of money to put it into this highway in a wilder- 
ness ? Is it wise to undertake all these risks, 
expend all this treasure, devote all this thought, 
care, anxiety ? The one answer of the capitalist, 
of the engineer, of the managers of the scheme, 
is simply, " Wait and see." You must wait till 
you see these untenanted fields taken up by the 
thronging immigrants. You must wait till these 
streams begin to pull at the wheels of factories, 
these plains to turn yellow with the ripening 
grain, these scattering settlements to grow to 
hamlets and towns and thriving cities. You 
must wait till the heavy-laden trains toil across 
the country with great freights of produce, and 
come back bearing the supplies for these fresh 
communities. That is the answer to all your 
queries. That proves that the work was one of 
construction, — that it built up and increased 

6 



82 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

values, and enlarged the utilities of the country. 
It proves that the investment was directed 
toward a genuine profit. It shows how well be- 
stowed was all the thought of the financier and 
the builder. The purpose of that early work 
does not appear till late in the process of the 
scheme ; but when it does come, it explains and 
justifies everything preliminary. 

Now, are not these cases quite analogous to 
the moral universe, or, more exactly, the uni- 
verse in its moral relations ? These, too, in any 
fair construction, must be viewed according to 
their issue, and not according to their temporary 
and transitional aspects. We must not expect 
the solution of these mysteries of life and being 
in this twilight season of our existence. We 
must wait "until the day break and the shadows 
flee away." The gospel names the only ground 
upon which the past and present of this weary 
world can be reconciled to our tolerance. " Judge 
nothing," says Paul, " before the time, until the 
Lord come." 1 Remember, he seems to say, you 
are beholding only a transitory and provisional 
state of things. The whole scheme of life 
centres in and takes its meaning from life's high 

1 1 Corinthians iv. 5. 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 83 

purpose. The means and the process are only 
to be read in the light of the achievement of the 
Creator's end. The whole of the long and labo- 
rious progress wrought out with such expendi- 
ture of thought, such pangs and agon}', such 
suffering of the flesh, such anguish of spirit, is 
but the prelude to creation's true life, — the im- 
parting of the life of God to His creation as fast 
and as far as it can receive the same, till it 
shall enjoy the fulness of a divine spirit in that 
dav when the kingdoms of this world shall be 
subject to the will and spirit of love, — that 
wished-for time which men doubtfully expect in 
the u millennium ; " that epoch which the gospel 
calls " the coming of the Lord." 

XII. — Divine Fatherhood and Human 
Destiny. 

It is upon the sublime truth of the Divine 
fatherhood that we build the faith in man's final 
holiness. Because God's nature is unalterably 
love, and because man's birthright is inalienably 
sonship, it follows that his destiny must be one 
of good and holiness. Upon any line of logic 
from this great thought, we come inevitably 
to the conclusion that mankind is destined to 



84 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

redemption from the thraldom of sin and its 
sequences. Justice, mercy, and love, the essen- 
tial elements of fatherhood, all stand pledged to 
do the best for man, and to secure him from the 
awful destruction of an endless career of sinful- 
ness. Once accept the truth of the Divine father- 
hood in its fulness, — once realize the sublime 
significance that it gives to the human race, and 
to all the life of that race, — and it becomes im- 
possible to doubt that God has in view a destiny 
of good for all His children. It is impossible to 
conceive of the Infinite Father as conferring life 
upon children, in the full knowledge that by 
their own acts they would make that life a 
curse. It is impossible to conceive of this Father 
as making the fate of eternity turn upon the 
choice of these brief earthly years. It is impos- 
sible to conceive of Him as limiting His interest 
in man, and his efforts for him, to the life this 
side the grave. It is impossible to conceive that 
He would turn a deaf ear to the cry for pardon 
which might come even from the deeps of hell. 
It is impossible to conceive of Him as content 
with any vindication of His power or any triumph 
of His kingdom which does not include the rec- 
onciliation of His children, and their complete 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 85 

recovery to the joys and the duties of their in- 
heritance. It is impossible to conceive of any 
or all these things, because they are inconsistent 
with a fatherly character. They are utterly at 
variance with any conception of paternal nature 
which leaves that nature within the limits of our 
human definitions. For every human conception 
of fatherhood recognizes it as a relationship 
under law. It carries with it duties as well as 
privileges, — duties the highest, the noblest pos- 
sible to man ; but obligations still the more 
sacred, as they involve these very privileges. 
It is understood by all enlightened minds that 
the father assumes a responsibility and gives a 
tacit pledge in the very act of becoming a parent. 
He is under bonds to his child. That obliga- 
tion is self-imposed. He is in honor held to 
fulfil it. 

But now we ask, is it an audacious or an 
unwarrantable thought of God, to say that as 
our Creator, as the Author of our being, He has 
assumed a bond, and out of His own infinite 
free will undertaken certain obligations to His 
offspring ? It is not claimed that it lies in the 
power of man to put God under obligation. But 
it certainly lies in the power of God to bind 



86 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

Himself. And it is only a proper tribute to 
His infinite righteousness and justice, and not 
in the faintest degree an irreverent assumption 
of knowledge in divine things, to say that when 
He created man in His own image, made him 
His child and not simply His creature, gave him 
a self-conscious soul, and a nature capable of the 
most exquisite joy in finding its destiny as well 
as the most exquisite torture in missing that end, 
He put His own most adorable nature under 
bonds to see to it that He secured to every one 
of these conscious children of His the power to 
attain that joy and avoid that terrible disaster 
and loss. Set aside now every consideration in 
this matter except the single one that God made 
us, that He gave us all the powers that we pos- 
sess, including that awful faculty, so fraught 
with our own weal or woe, — the faculty of will- 
ing good or evil, — must we not say that by that 
sole and separate fact the Almighty God stands, 
self-bound, held by His own infinite justice and 
love, to bring us to our own and lead us into life 
and joy everlasting ? Righteousness must mean 
the same in God as it does in man. There are 
not two kinds of benevolence and of justice, of 
rectitude and of love, in this universe, — one for 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 87 

God and another for man. The mercy God 
shows a sinner is the same in quality as that 
which He enjoins upon His children. The love 
He bears us is the same in kind as that we bear 
each other. Else is there no meaning in the 
traits we ascribe to Him, or the honor we pay to 
His name. And to say that it is fair, or just, or 
loving in God to endow man with a gift in whose 
exercise man shall work his own eternal doom, 
is to give quite other meaning to those virtues 
and holy traits from what they convey when we 
apply them to ourselves. It may or may not 
be " an assumption unproved and unprovable " 
that " God is bound by the perfections of His 
nature to make all men happy ; " but will any 
man undertake to prove to the satisfaction of a 
Christian mind and heart that it is a perfectly 
fair and just procedure to endow man with a 
nature so frail and peccable that it broke down 
at the start, and has been working but imper- 
fectly ever since, and then to doom him to eter- 
nal torments for not getting it reduced to order 
and regularity during the brief years of a mortal 
life ? God is bound by the perfections of His 
nature not to make a being whose very constitu- 
tion renders it morally certain that it will be 



88 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

unhappy, not for a few brief years but forever 
and forever. To deliberately organize a soul 
for a career of woe would be to lack the very 
first elements of affectionate paternity. 

We need not try to discover the workings of 
the Infinite Mind, or attempt a psychology or a 
system of ethics for Divinity. But He who 
taught us to say " Our Father," and gave us the 
sweet domestic thought of God which we. find in 
the parable of the Prodigal, surely warrants us 
in thinking of Him as working in fatherly ways 
and governed by motives at least as high and 
loving as those that rule the hearts of earthly 
fathers. And can we think that the loving God, 
knowing the awful possibilities of the life of 
each separate soul, would have called us into 
being unless He had foreseen that at last each 
one of us would come to good and peace and joy ? 
It sometimes puts a terrible strain upon our faith 
in God's fatherhood to contemplate the suffer- 
ing with which this earth is so full ; to see the 
millions of men and women who come into this 
world only to be buffeted by its adversities and 
torn by its severities, dragged through its hells, 
and hurried down to the dark deaths of the sin- 
ful. And the only thought which saves us from 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 89 

crying out of our sympathizing hearts that God 
has made a fearful mistake in creating men is 
the faith which holds us, in spite of all this mis- 
ery, that God is leading man through the shad- 
ows to the stars, that strife and sorrow are 
growing less, and man is being reclaimed and 
fitted for a true sonship with all its joys. In 
that hope one can go into the meanest hovel 
where poverty grovels in rags ; one can go to 
the most miserable wreck of a noble life, and 
say in faith, — 

1 » The wrong that pains my soul below 
I dare not throne above ; 
I know not of His hate, — I know 
His goodness and His love." 

But if there be no hope at the end ; if God 
has no alternative but to send these hapless 
souls from a birth into sin, on to an eternity of 
woe ; if the aimless sufferings of this life are but 
the prelude to sufferings in another existence 
that are endless as well as aimless, — then may 
we exclaim, " Would God we had never been, 
rather than be and suffer all these hopeless ills ! 
It had been better for us that we had never been 
born ; better if God had left us in the silence 



90 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

and the void whence we came forth ; better that 
we had never known the powers and the capaci- 
ties of conscious life, than that, having received 
them, they should be turned into a miserable and 
a ceaseless curse. If God has no mercy for the 
end, He might have had in the beginning." 

But thanks to the revelation made in Jesus 
Christ, God has vindicated His fatherly love, and 
given assurance of His merciful grace, in the 
pledge He has sealed to make us all alive in 
Christ. He will be true to all the obligations of 
fatherhood. He will leave nothing undone, no 
labor and no sacrifice, to vindicate and prove 
His care for His own. Once our Father he is 
always our Father, and the eternal years will 
not sunder nor weaken the tie that makes us 
His. And that truth is the most telling, the 
most persuasive, the most saving that ever was 
preached to the children of men. No moral 
force that ever was brought to bear upon human 
life has exerted upon it such influence to save, 
to regenerate, and to purify, as the truth of God's 
fatherly love revealed in the sacrifice of Jesus 
Christ. The ancient world was alwavs at a loss 
to find a motive which should stir men out of 
their sins, and into the religious life. The world 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 91 

found the missing impulse when Christ, to mani- 
fest our Father's love, came and died upon the 
cross. That act was at once the evidence and 
the illustration of the love of God. It was an 
object-lesson in the spiritual economy. And it 
touched the heart of the world. It has always 
touched it. It is the power which God meant 
should touch it. It was a revelation to man of 
his true spiritual birthright; and it filled him 
with a desire to claim his own. 

XIII. — The Divine Fatherhood and Human 

Conduct. 

It is a cheering thought to him who loves this 
mighty truth of the Fatherhood of God, that it 
is just beginning to assert its power as a motive 
in conduct. The most intelligent and experi- 
enced workers with weak and sinful men have 
learned that nothing converts men, nothing wins 
them to God, like the simple declaration of the 
truth that they are God's children, partakers of 
His love, objects of His mercy, and capable of 
becoming in character what they already are in 
nature. There is no appeal so strong as this, 
none that so invariably reaches and moves the 
human heart. 



92 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

When all other appeals to man's selfish and 
corrupted heart have failed, there is one thought 
that does not fail, and that will not fail, at last 
to reach every sinful souL You may go to men 
with warnings, and not move them. You may 
hold over them the terrors of the law, and only 
harden them. You may appeal to their selfish- 
ness, and never rouse in them a particle of aver- 
sion to themselves and their own debased living. 
But many a time when all else has failed to 
touch human hearts, and it seems as if, for 
this life at least, the soul must go on its 
wretched and rebellious way, there is dropped 
some word that starts the sense of sonship, — 
some thought comes home to the hard heart 
that quickens that dead and withered feeling 
of relationship to God, and a claim on the bless- 
ings of the great family privileges and rights. 
And when that nerve is stirred it is not far 
away to the spot where the wanderer will meet 
its God in the way, and make a willing surren- 
der to its Father. It often happens that the aged 
man, sick and suffering, wandering in his mind 
and uncertain in his memories, goes back past 
all the years, and seems to be living again the 
years of his boyhood. He is once more a child 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 93 

in the old home. He calls the names of his play- 
mates. He wanders in the old haunts, roams the 
old fields, plays the old games. He has lost all 
hold upon the years, be they good or be they bad, 
which lie between him and those early days. 
Everything else has slipped away from him. 
But the one thing which memory will not let 
go is the thought of childhood, the ties which 
knit themselves there, and the loves formed then, 
which have lasted through all the long years of 
labor and of loss. And so when a human soul 
lies in the weakness and exhaustion of its life- 
long sins, and is insensible to every call that 
would rouse it from the stupor of degradation, 
there is one voice, one summons, which seems 
to set all the heartstrings in motion, and to 
reach the one instinct which cannot be removed 
from the soul, of sonship to God. 

And what follows when this perception of the 
eternal relationship is once aroused in the heart ? 
What are the consequences of a recognition of 
God's fatherhood and our sonship ? There are 
two faces to this truth ; and while the one looks 
toward God, there is another and equally mo- 
mentous one which looks directly at us. We 
need have no fear but that through all eternity 
our Father will be true to His obligations, per- 



94 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

form every duty and guard every interest of His 
children. We are safe in His hands, and we 
have nothing to fear from Him. For whether 
He smite or whether He heal, whether He act 
or whether He wait ; whether He come to us 
with tenderness or in the fire of His wrath, " He 
doeth all things well." He is eternally true to 
His fatherhood. 

But are we as faithful to our sonship ? Do we 
serve God as faithfully as God serves us ? Do 
we give as He gives ? God acknowledges His re- 
lationship to us. But do we, even while we feel 
and believe that we bear God's image, rise to the 
height of the duties which that fact lays upon 
every one of us? Every truth has an ethical 
bearing. Some duty grows out of every fact of 
the moral nature. And the most imperative, the 
most exacting, the most sweeping truth in its re- 
lation to the human conscience, is that of man's 
sonship to God. What does a child owe to a par- 
ent? What does dependence owe to the strength 
on which it hangs ? What does feebleness owe 
to the care which nurses it, and ignorance to 
the wisdom which guides and instructs, and 
waywardness to the heart that restrains and 
chastens ? What does helplessness owe to love ? 
What does the transgressor owe to the heart 



THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 95 

of mercy and of pardon? That, all that and 
more, man owes to his Father. We cannot read 
that fact of the spiritual world and shut our 
eyes to its personal import. The light that 
streams from it illuminates conscience as well as 
intellect; it reveals a duty as well as a hope. 
You are a son of God ; but are you living like 
one? You belong to the great family ; but have 
you done your duty by your brother, or your 
father ? You are entitled to your inheritance as 
an heir of life ; have you ever claimed your 
own ? You are debtor to the Father, who begot 
you, reared you, endowed you, educated you, and 
still holds your portion in trust for you ; have 
you ever paid a farthing of your debt, by grati- 
tude, by the giving of your love in return, by 
obedience, or by sacrifice ? 

There is no humiliation in this life more com- 
plete than that which overtakes the man who 
finds he has been unjust to his friend ; has re- 
paid love with suspicion, benefits with coldness, 
and generous interest with aversion. When the 
blinded and perverse heart sees what it has 
done, it bends in the heaviness of grief and of 
mortification. One does not like to look into the 
face which has been thus repelled, and feel that 



96 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. 

life has been one long, sad mistake. And worst 
of all is the shame which befalls when the one 
who has been wronged is a father, who has been 
robbed of filial tenderness, cheated of that love 
which was his due, kept out of the sympathy and 
appreciative recognition which is the best re- 
ward of his heart for all its denials and its 
labors. Can we imagine any remorse more cut- 
ting than that which pierces the heart of him 
who has been a false, a hard, a wayward son, 
coming at last to a consciousness of his crime ? 
And yet that, and worse, is the fate of every soul 
which forgets its duties to the Heavenly Father, 
turns its back on God, and cheats Him of the 
honor and the love which is His due. For our 
disobedience is robbery from God. Estranged 
from Him, we wrong His love; and when we 
come to ourselves, it is to find that we have been 
sinning against our dearest Friend. Thank God, 
He has forgiveness for even this wrong, and 
when we turn us again to His face, He meets 
with outstretched arms His returning sons and 
daughters. 



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